Site menu:

So my three day, two night, five presentation blogvangelism worldwind was just way too much fun for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was getting to meet some of the people who are continually teaching me by their willingness to share their ideas online. David Warlick for intstance. And Susan Herzog. And Steven Cohen. And Michael Stephens. And meeting all sorts of other educators who are out there plugging away at bringing all of these technologies to their schools or to their practice. It was just a great couple of days.

Some brief impressions/vignettes:

*At the Internet@Schools East conference a librarian from an inner city D.C. school came up and told me that while she found the technologies interesting, she didn’t know how to even start thinking about using them at her school. “Most of my kids can’t read,” she said. It was a sobering reminder of what many teachers are faced with.

*At my CIL presentation on wikis, I showed them how easy it was to edit content by going to a Star Trek wiki entry on “Sick Bay” (which is amazing in itself) and changing it to “Slick Bay.” One of the attendees took me to task at the end of the presentation for showing how easy it was to vandalize a site, and it was a great point. I hadn’t meant it as that, obviously, but I also hadn’t fixed what I had done, and she felt, rightly so, that it sent a bad message. As she was talking, I was furiously back tracking through my presentation to go back and repair the damage. But, as luck would have it, it turned into a teachable moment when everyone saw the page had already been fixed when I pulled it back up.

*In Detroit, I was amazed with fully ¾ of the audience raised their hands when I asked how many of them knew what blogs were. And, remarkably, about the same number raised their hands about RSS. Now that was a shocker. But between the three conferences, there were over 15 presentations on technologies stemming from the Read/Write Web. The word is getting out.

*My presentations were blogged by David and and Christina Pikas which for some reason feels kind of weird. In fact, Christina may very well be the person who expressed her disdain at my messing with the Star Trek site.

*I was also amazed at how many people came up to me saying their districts were blocking sites like Blogger. Oy.

5 Comments

Yes, it was I who took you to task. I regret if I was a little harsh, but I’ve found that the first thing people do when they learn about wikis is to get on one and vandalize it to see if it gets fixed. Certainly it’s not any better when a professor from Buffalo does it than when anyone else does it — unless he publishes his results and prevents others from trying it (this was in the news a few months ago, I guess). What happens is that the people who really care about the wiki end up spending time fixing problems instead of adding new content and this hurts us all.

Thanks for the great presentations at MACUl. I had at least three people from my area who were inspired by you. One who had signed for a blog and is now convinced she has to start using it and two teachers from an elementary school in my county signed up for blogs on my site. Thanks for the great work.

I was re-reading your post on your workshop experiences. I gave a lot of thought about the librarian from Washington D.C. who came up and said she didn’t know where to start because her students couldn’t read. I worked for many years in a school with students who had reading problems. Often the answer to this problem was to “dumb down” the curriculum to meet their needs. I learn through experience that motivation is as important as skills. These students think they are dumb because they can’t read. They aren’t dumb they just can’t read. Why not use technology to motivate them to read and write. Poetry, writing prompts, and real world writing can help them to express themselves. Let them publish and read other students’ writing. They can do this even if the teacher or parent has to assist. It may not be great reading and writing, but I bet it would inspire them to try to write and read more than the last worksheet!

I often hear educators using their students or their situation as excuses rather than looking for ways to help the students. There are far too many great teachers out there in poor schools doing great things with little resources to say I can’t do this because…. Find a way to make it work for your kids!

Sorry to rant so much, but as you can tell this touch a cord in my heart.